A Microsoft spokesperson has made it very clear, that while we might have seen backwards compatibility for DirectX 11 – allowing for Vista support – DirectX 11.1 would be exclusive to Windows 8 only.

“DirectX 11.1 is part of Windows 8, just like DirectX 11 was part of Windows 7. DirectX 11 was made available for Vista …. but at this point there is no plan for DirectX 11.1 to be made available on Windows 7,” reads the statement posted over on Neowin.

Vista got 11, why no 11.1 on 7?

Fortunately DX11.1 isn’t exactly a big changer. While DX11 brought us improved physics and the eye popping tessellation, DX11.1’s biggest feature is the incorporation of stereoscopic 3D in games that otherwise might not have supported it. Other improvements include:

Shader tracing and compiler enhancements

Direct3D device sharing

Check support of new Direct3D 11.1 features and formats

Use HLSL minimum precision

Specify user clip planes in HLSL on feature level 9 and higher

Create larger constant buffers than a shader can access

Use logical operations in a render target

Force the sample count to create a rasterizer state

Process video resources with shaders

Extended support for shared Texture2D resources

Change subresources with new copy options

Discard resources and resource views

Support a larger number of UAVs

Bind a subrange of a constant buffer to a shader

Retrieve the subrange of a constant buffer that is bound to a shader

Clear all or part of a resource view

Map SRVs of dynamic buffers with NO_OVERWRITE

Use UAVs at every pipeline stage

Extended support for WARP devices

Use Direct3D in Session 0 processes

KitGuru Says: Considering quite a few have suggested they plan to skip Windows 8 altogether, this could mean that the adoption rate for DX11.1 will be pretty low? What do you guys think?